“The idea is to remove hierarchy rather than deliberately behave as if there is no hierarchy. That is solid bad faith. There will never be a total absence of hierarchy. And that’s what’s fun in the classroom, it’s not that you’re being ethical, it’s that the ethical might flower.”
- Spivak in Mark Sanders’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, p. 120
As you can see from my reading list, I’m a fan of the blog Stuff White People Like. I’m also White (proof: I like all of the things listed here, with the exception of Manhattan, which I haven’t got around to visiting. I ‘did’ South America before Europe, you see.). So, apparently, are most of the folks who dig the site, to the point where the (white) author is soon to release a book with Random House. To some extent the whole trajectory of this blog takes on an outline of ressentiment; configured by Fiona Probyn as a “giving that is always already a taking”. The self-reflexive white subject (self-reflexivity being, undoubtedly, something else that White People Like) recognises themselves with some shame, laughs at themselves (such is their white humility), generates a similarly motivated following of white compadrés. The blog author gets a book deal. The white readers buy the book. And at the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether power, or at least capital, has shifted any; although I guess that’s the edge of irony, and humour …
“The axiomatic distinction between the utopic on the one hand and the utopian on the other can be described in terms of the latter as a perversion, a rigidification of the former. The utopic is a disposition, a manner of speech, an attitude, a procedure in semiosis, even if that procedure necessarily bears a proximity to the Kristevan semanalyse, the semiotic critique of the semiotic. Utopia is a fixed form. This analysis flies in the face of that line of interpretation that sees Utopia as heteroglossic. The heterological character of the discourse characterises the utopic. Utopia is the monoglossic face of the utopic. In Kristevan terms it is thetic, according to the categories of Roland Barthes it is doxic, a monologic discourse invariably constructed in terms of ideas by which contradictory and inevitable exclusions are defined.” (…)
“The utopic is the disagreement that Utopia cannot sustain. Utopia is the dream of perfect control, of both culture and nature. The definitive totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have utopian motivations, motivations resulting in the figure of perfectibility. Utopia is spoken in the language of domination, and speaks it.” (…)
“The utopic is marked by an excess of signification, Utopia by its formalisation. In the totalised ideological mise-en-scene that is late capitalist language, the utopic is the space of the displaced discourse, the internal exile of the concept.”
- Bernhard Sachs, ‘In the General Gouvernement of Semiosis/Against Utopia: Utopic Articulation as Act’, The Office of Utopic Procedures, West Space, 2002.
It was reported in Brazil this week that 6 people have been given prison sentences over the killing of MST and Via Campesina activist Valmir Mota de Oliveira, on an acampamento in Paraná on October 21st, less than three months ago. It is well known by now that Oliveira was shot by an armed ’security guard’ from NF Security, contracted by GM seeds multinational Sygenta*, and other ‘guards’ critically injured a number of other MST and VC militantes. According to Folha de São Paulo, Fabio Fereira, from NF, was also killed (this was new to me - there is no account of this in either the Via Campesina or MST reports). Celso Barbosa, an MST militante, has been charged with his murder and therefore makes up one of the sentenced, along with comrade Célia Lourenço.
Like MAS (although there are different interests and histories involved - not least that the MST is primarily a non-indigenous movement), 500 years of feral colonial power weighs on the MST’s efforts to secure land and, for that matter, land that flourishes organically and provides for all who live and work on it (MST settlements, in my brief experience, really do live up to that idea in many ways).
I’m thinking a lot on how the climax of killing and maiming allows those who have this weight behind them to claim that they are trapped beneath it. How this preposterous imbalance seems unable to avoid creating a world divided into victims and perpetrators, especially when it is a matter of taking life to save your own, which I imagine to be Barbosa’s (completely plausible) argument. And how the discourse of nonviolence can repeat this division by designating ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’ movements, events and people.
*Syngenta has an office in Australia of course, located here:
Level 1, 2-4 Lyon Park Road North Ryde NSW 2113, Australia
An aunty of mine reminded me of something very important the other day. I was talking about my project and my/its interest in ethics. I liked the idea of ethics, I said, as do others; because ethics are guidelines rather than rules: people don’t feel like they are compelled to rigidly conform. Ethics are more ambiguous, relying on translation and context. “I guess” she said “people like to feel like they have a choice. And that’s the small-l liberal thing, isn’t it, choice?”.
I’m going to have to think about this. For if the ethics that I write don’t go beyond the liberal project then they repeat the political gestures born of wounded attachments. Ethics posed as “the answer” to postmodern aporias is problematic. Ethics as lifestyle choice. Removing the government, but not the governmentality. I would hope the impossibility of ethics a là Derrida removes its choice. Juste rather than droit. Impossible consequence rather than chooseable consequence. Ethics of complicity, complicity as enfoldedness-in-human-being, to shadow Mark Sanders. It’s easier to demonize someone than to face up to their pain, the pain of your complicity. Not necessarily complicity as prosecutability, but complicity as enfoldedness…
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